This Week in E-Commerce: Shopify Summer '23 Editions, Wayfair Virtual Room Styler, & eBay's Master Plan

This week I dive into Shopify's latest Summer '23 Editions, the future of eBay, short-form video, GA4 e-commerce updates, and Wayfair's new virtual room styler.

ASHEVILLE, NC, UNITED STATES, July 31, 2023/EINPresswire.com/ -- This is a summary recap of the 132nd Edition of the Shopifreaks E-commerce Newsletter - brought to you by Paul Drecksler. Check out the full edition for links and sources.

1. Shopify released its latest Summer '23 Edition, which included a handful of AI improvements, new collaborative selling features, improved checkout, and more. The theme of this Edition is “Imagine” because as Harley Finkelstein said, “we all need to reimagine our businesses.”

2. One of the standout announcements from Summer '23 Editions was the public launch of Shopify Collective, a new feature that lets brands on Shopify collaborate and sell products from each other's stores. Merchants find products they'd like to sell from other brands, import them into their store, and then customers can buy those products right from their store, mixed with their own products in the cart.

3. The other standout announcement from Summer '23 Editions was the launch of Shopify Credit, a business credit card designed exclusively for its merchants. The card is powered by Stripe (which also powers Shopify Payments and Shopify Balance), issued by Celtic Bank, and accepted everywhere Visa is. It offers 3% cash back on a merchant's top spend category, and 1% on remaining categories such as wholesale, marketing, and shipping.

4. eBay's CEO, Jamie Iannone, recently shared insight about the next phase of the company's evolution. Iannone told analysts on a recent earnings call to expect a “comprehensive overhaul” of eBay's user experience and design that would be rolled out in phases over the course of 2023 and beyond, mentioning upcoming updates to the View Item page, header, homepage, search results, and other landing pages. He later told Insider that new technologies such as artificial intelligence would supercharge the company's growth.

5. Digiday did a recap of how Google, Meta, and Snap's battle with TikTok in short-form video is playing out. TikTok has over 1B monthly active users, while YouTube Shorts are watched by more than 2B logged-in users every month. TikTok garners the top daily watch time amount, recording 118 minutes compared to 75 minutes on YouTube, 52 minutes on Facebook, 31 minutes on Instagram, and 22 minutes on Snapchat. More than 75% of Meta's advertisers now use Reel ads.

6. Wayfair launched Decorify, a new app that uses generative AI to create shoppable, photorealistic images of spaces in your home. Customers upload an image of their space and prompt the app to reimagine it in a different style like bohemian, farmhouse, crack house, mid-century modern, or industrial. Decorify then presents redesigned images of the room that reflect the requested look and feel. From there, customers can browse various designs, which include products that can be purchased from Wayfair.

7. According to WSJ, TikTok s planning on launching its online marketplace in the U.S. in the coming month, where it will ship a variety of products from Chinese sellers including clothes, kitchen gadgets, and electronics. TikTok will only pay Chinese suppliers once they find buyers in the U.S. and will return unpopular items “to avoid being stuck with inventory.” The company also said that it plans to open up its program to merchants outside of China as it works to create an “international settlement and logistics system.”

8. Google has announced an expansion of e-commerce measurement capabilities in Google Analytics 4, which include 30 new dimensions and metrics. With the new changes, merchants will have to build less custom reports to access key revenue metrics.

9. Ad spend increased across Google, Meta, Amazon, and Walmart during the first two quarters of 2023. One standout ad buyer was Temu, who is now competing against 82% of U.S. advertisers, a higher share than Walmart.

10. Amazon India has launched a first-of-its-kind floating package delivery service in India that will serve customers on Dal Lake and Nigeen Lake. Previously residents had to paddle their way to the shores by boat to pick up their Amazon packages, which will now be delivered to their doorsteps.

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Paul Drecksler
Shopifreaks E-commerce Newsletter
[email protected]
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